


Y'know, That Rich People Bullshit

by cookinguptales



Category: Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Ready or Not (2019)
Genre: Crossover, Extra Treat, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27287827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookinguptales/pseuds/cookinguptales
Summary: The best thing about going through hell is coming out the other side. Astrid meets someone at a party who seems to know that better than anyone.
Relationships: Grace Le Domas/Astrid Leong
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Y'know, That Rich People Bullshit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlingargents](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/gifts).



> darlingargents, as soon as you requested this pairing, I became consumed with it. I guess this is just my life now.
> 
> (Happy Halloween!)

Astrid couldn’t be sure what drew her to the woman. Maybe it was how she held herself. Strong, wary. Without pretense. It was how Rachel always held herself in a crowd of wolves. It was how Michael had always wished he could.

Or maybe it was the sparkle in those blue eyes. The gleam of golden hair. The way that green dress hugged her curves just so.

Maybe it was just that she was drunk. No one else was at the party; no one else was willing to show the slightest bit of vulnerability to the other parties present. But no one was about to tell the new heir to the Le Domas gaming _dominion_ to slow down.

“Hello,” Astrid said, approaching the twenty-thousand-dollar couch that the woman was currently draped on. “My name is Astrid.”

The woman looked at her for a moment with a steadiness that was a little unnerving. “Grace.”

Grace Le Domas. The newest member of the Le Domas family. For that matter, she was the _only_ member of the Le Domas family. Widowed on her wedding night, Astrid had heard. A freak fire. A terrible tragedy. Maybe that was what had put those shadows in her eyes.

Or maybe that smoke, like the feral steel in Grace’s smile, was all natural.

Astrid tipped her head forward towards the couch. “Do you mind if I sit?” she asked, nodding towards her feet. Astrid had been trained to be on her feet for hours at these things, obviously, no matter how high the heels. Mingling had been a part of her job description since before she could walk. But the Jimmy Choos were as good of an excuse as any to sit down by Grace.

Grace, for her part, only shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

Astrid sat down on the edge of the couch, an easy grace to her motions that had been borne of many years of practice. She held herself like a bird poised to take off at any moment, and it felt all the more artificial next to Grace’s casual slouch.

Grace wasn’t looking at her. She was watching the crowd mill by with a tipsy disinterest that was not common at these parties. And Astrid, well, she wasn’t used to having people not look at her. She found herself watching Grace as Grace watched others.

But Astrid wasn’t disinterested at all.

Grace stuck out like a sore thumb here. Even Rachel -- for all that she’d come from America, like Grace, and had married into old money, like Grace -- even Rachel had at least _tried_ to impress the new society in which she’d found herself. But Grace, Grace just looked… tired.

“Don’t you hate them all sometimes?” Grace asked suddenly, and Astrid swallowed.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Don’t you just fucking hate them? Rich fucking bastards,” Grace said with an indelicate snort. “Look at them. Feeling each other out for weak spots. Fuckin’ predators.”

Astrid blinked. Grace, it seemed, was drunk enough to say the quiet part out loud. “I…”

Grace turned to look at her, finally, and her eyes held a flintiness that didn’t look nearly as inebriated as her loose talk suggested. “I guess you are, too, probably.”

Astrid looked down at her lap to her hands for a moment. She thought about her charity work and the efforts she made to give back. She thought about reading to Cassian at night, soft and gentle and sweet. She thought about the way that she’d wanted to hit Michael so hard that he’d never look in a mirror without wincing ever again. “Probably,” she admitted.

The edge of Grace’s lips tipped up into another smile, and it was almost shark-like. “Yeah. Me too, now, I guess.” She paused, and Astrid could see something flicker behind those pale eyes. “I never let my guard down anymore. Not anymore. I guess you never have, have you?” she asked.

Astrid smiled thinly. “Once,” she said.

“Oh?” Grace asked, one eyebrow quirking upward.

Astrid felt her smile widen, just a touch. It felt just a little more genuine under Grace’s heavy gaze. “Now we’re divorced.”

“Ah,” Grace said, and her gaze shifted somehow, went a little considering. She pointed towards her own chest, and Astrid followed her finger obligingly. “Widowed.”

It took Astrid a second to stop looking at that chest and fully digest what Grace had said. “Oh! Right. I’m — I’m so sorry,” she said. It’d been stupid to talk about her husband. As cowardly as he’d been, at least the miserable cheater was still alive.

“Don’t be,” Grace said with a little wave of her hand. “He turned out to be a rich fucking bastard, too.” She grimaced. “Fuck. Tell me, Astrid, are all rich people crazy?”

This time, Astrid’s smile was true. “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

Grace blinked at her for a moment, temporarily thrown off her game. Then she smiled again, and Astrid got a glimpse of a much younger woman. Or maybe just a few months younger, she amended, remembering the Le Domases’ recent woes. Either way, she looked genuinely pleased for just a moment, and Astrid…

Astrid wanted more of that.

“What do you think does it to them?” Grace asked her. “You know, as an expert?”

Astrid laughed. “Well, we weren’t raised in the normal world, were we?” she asked. “We were all spoiled rotten. Some people never grow out of that, I suppose. They just stay… dependent.” She glanced over at one of her sloppier cousins, then looked quickly away. “Or worse, they get hungry for more.”

“Yeah,” Grace said, and she sounded far away all the sudden. “Or both. You’re desperate to _stay_ dependent, at any cost.”

It took quite a bit of Astrid’s poise not to react to that. “You’re right. You’re very right.” She wondered how Grace had earned that knowledge. She had a feeling that it hadn’t been the easy way. “And with people like that at your nursery school, it becomes a bit hard to trust people. Your best friends are sometimes your worst enemies in disguise. And your family…”

Astrid trailed off, not quite sure where to finish with that. Family was a complicated subject. “Families… can be very attached to tradition,” she finally said. “For better or for worse.”

Grace scoffed. “God, _fuck_ tradition. And fuck families, for that matter.”

Astrid frowned, and she felt her forehead crease just the tiniest bit. “Family is important,” she said. “Sometimes they’re there for you when no one else is.”

She remembered the way her grandmother had held gently to her arm as they’d walked down the aisle at the wedding of a couple who would hopefully be more successful than she had been. She remembered the way that it had been the only way she’d been able to bear being seen by the _rest_ of her family.

“And sometimes they’re not,” Grace said, and Astrid’s eyes widened. No one sounded that bitter without a story. No one. But before she could even think to wonder, Grace was continuing. “Let me tell you about family. I wanted family — so bad. I wanted it so bad, Astrid. I wanted the whole nine yards. The wedding, the Thanksgivings, the fuckin’ — fuckin’ family _traditions_. But it was all just bullshit.” She waved a hand around vaguely at all the partygoers, some of whom were starting to notice her ramblings. “All this old money. The history. The traditions. They’re just bullshit, aren’t they? Everyone looks so bright and shiny and put together, but we’re all just bullshit underneath, aren’t we? Fuck.”

Astrid frowned, very aware of all the eyes on them now. “Why don’t we talk outside?” she asked.

Grace looked at her wordlessly for a solid minute, and Astrid finally found herself wondering if she’d ever really imbibed at all. There was a looseness to the way she held herself, a devil-may-care attitude that seemed wholly out of place at a party like this, but she still seemed lucid.

Perhaps it was just that Grace just did not give one single fuck.

“Sure,” Grace finally said. “Okay. Okay, Astrid Leong, let’s talk outside.”

Astrid covered up her surprise by offering Grace a hand and pulling her towards the balcony doors when it was accepted.

“You know who I am?” Astrid asked as soon as they found each other in the cool evening air. She hadn’t expected it, somehow. Rachel and Michael hadn’t known who anyone was at these parties at first. She hadn’t been expecting Grace to do any better than they had.

But Grace looked at her with those too-old, too-smart, too-wary eyes and Astrid suddenly felt very foolish for assuming her to be unprepared. Grace had the air of a woman who would never be caught unprepared again.

“Of course I know who you are,” Grace said, leaning forward against the stone railing of the balcony. “Astrid Leong. Smart, rich, drop-dead gorgeous. You’re the only person any of them manage to talk about without cussing.” She shot Astrid a sidelong look. “On the inside. They cuss on the inside. Usually.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Astrid said, leaning back against the railing so she could look into Grace’s eyes. “They just don’t know you well enough to tell you what they really think about me.” She sighed. “And the divorce.”

Grace just looked back at her, levelly, and Astrid felt seen on a level that she wasn’t quite comfortable with. “Yeah, those bitches hate how together your life is even though you're a divorcée. They totally wanted you to crash and burn. Fall right off those Louboutins.”

“They’re Jimmy Choos,” Astrid corrected faintly.

“But you’re still smart and rich and drop-dead gorgeous, aren’t you? Still standing tall. No wonder they hate you too much to talk shit.” Grace closed her eyes for a second and just breathed. “Don’t you ever want to tell them to go fuck themselves?”

Grace was right, of course. Grace was a perfect stranger, but she was absolutely right. This whole party was dripping in bullshit. Astrid had held her head high at every one of these parties the past six months. She’d smiled and made polite conversation and taken canapés. She hadn’t cowered like a ruined woman. Because she wasn’t scared anymore. She wasn’t scared of being too big or too powerful or too _much._

And that scared _them._

Every one of the interactions she’d had lately had been even faker than usual. Every one of them had that look in their eyes, the pity mixed with glee that faded to resentment as soon as they realized that she would not shy away. Not ever again.

The family she’d built with Michael had been bullshit. The image that she’d tried to protect by keeping his affairs secret had been bullshit. The self that she’d tried so carefully to maintain, that quiet, demure, never-larger-than-him self had been bullshit, too.

And as much as her family was built on tradition, on sacrifice, on things older than her and more important than her that would probably outlive every one of her petty squabbles, maybe Grace was right there, too. Maybe just one or two of those things — maybe they were kind of bullshitty as well.

Like trying to marry a man they all approved of. Like dousing a part of herself so they could be pretend to be a couple that would finally be accepted. Like burying all of her pain and sadness and rage deep inside of her so her family’s perfect image would remain unsullied.

She looked at Grace, who didn’t care about any of that, who maybe actively disliked it. Who didn’t care that she was an old money Leong or that she owned apartment buildings or even about her fucking bullshit ex-husband.

Astrid let out a breath that she’d been keeping in for far, far too long and finally felt her shoulders slump from where she’d held them so finely. “Yes,” she admitted. “Sometimes I want to tell them to go fuck themselves.”

Grace’s eyes snapped open. “Wow. That’s more like it. I like you a lot better when you take off the tiara, you know.”

And the wild part of it, Astrid realized, with a giddy sort of buoyancy in her chest, was that it was true. Grace didn’t _care_ about Astrid’s “class”. And that buoyancy felt freeing in a way, felt exhilarating, and the prim, fragile wall she'd built up around her heart fractured to make way for it.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I want to tell them that they were all right about Michael. He wasn’t good enough for me. But it had nothing to do with his fortune or his family or how many fucking Patek Philippes he had. It had to do with _me_. I deserved better than a cheating coward like him. And I deserve — I deserve better than _them._ I deserve better than stupid, shallow assholes who gossip about me and my misfortunes. I deserve better than family members who whisper behind their hands about me. I deserve better than friends who put dead fish in people’s beds. I deserve _better._ ”

“Yeah,” Grace agreed, and Astrid realized with a start that she looked — she looked _admiring._ “You sure fucking do.”

Astrid looked at Grace then, really looked at her. Looked at her brand-new dress and her smudged makeup and the way she didn’t look at ease in any of it, not really. She looked at those eyes, those sharp-as-fucking-knives eyes, and she saw the weariness there. The anger. The _admiration_.

She thought about the way that every fucking person in that party was probably gossiping about Grace’s no-name dress and the way that she’d somehow conned her way into millions of dollars and a name she didn’t “deserve”. No one cared about the eyes she had or the history she kept locked tight within them. No one cared to dig deeper than the most shallow of appearances. No one would ever ask if Grace was okay.

And Astrid didn’t want to be like them. Not one little bit.

“You do, too,” she finally said, all her anger condensed down into a whisper. “We both deserve better.”

Grace smiled, and it was that young, pretty smile that Astrid had glimpsed once before. But this time there was something a little more to it. Something flirty. The beginnings of an ember that Astrid was sure that she could fan into flames.

If she wanted to.

Grace turned slightly against the railing so she could knock the side of her hand against Astrid’s. “We do. We both deserve better than this stupid party, too. We have all the money in the world and we spend it on what? Making entertainment for assholes? Nah. Fuck that. You wanna get out of here?”

Astrid wasn’t stupid. She was a pretty girl and she’d known plenty of other pretty girls in her life. She knew what that expression on Grace’s face meant. What was being offered to her.

If she wanted it.

She thought about the way people had joked with Michael at parties. At how he’d stiffen every time and wouldn’t touch her hand in the car on the way home. She thought about how it’d broken them, the jeers and the disrespect and the unkindness.

She thought about how much worse it would be if she walked out of this party with a woman. One with new-old money. One who didn’t know that parties were for showing off and networking, not having fun. One who didn’t know the old ways or the new expectations. One who didn’t even seem to care who she’d offend by walking out of this party early.

She imagined how her family would treat Grace at a party. And then she imagined what Grace would say right back to their faces. How they’d smile and laugh together about it on the way home.

Astrid looked into those eyes of Grace’s, those steel-blue eyes, and she knew somehow, intrinsically, that Grace was not the kind of woman who would ever ask her to be anything other than herself.

And maybe Astrid was tired of pretending. Tired of all that goddamn bullshit.

“Yeah,” she said, letting her fingers knock against Grace’s, allowed their fingers to lace together just a little bit. “I would. In fact, I have a hotel or two nearby that we could go visit.”

“Ooh, a whole hotel,” Grace said, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively. “All I have is a burned-down mansion.”

“You can rebuild,” Astrid said, taking Grace’s hand more fully in hers and leading her back towards the party so they could find the door.

She thought about her own life, in shambles on the ground all around her Jimmy Choos. She thought about a life that was open now, that she could rebuild any way she wanted. With anyone she wanted.

Grace squeezed Astrid’s hand as they walked and she laughed, sounding carefree for the first time all night.

And then, as they went once more into the fray, Grace glanced over at her, no fear whatsoever in her eyes. “So, what was that about the dead fish?”


End file.
